Reading Time: 4 minutes America’s housing shortage is a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. We need a lot of new housing, but no one wants it built in their community.
Human rights
Posted inPolitics
The lights are shining in Blue America
Reading Time: 4 minutes While red states continue to suffer from laws they voted for, Democrats in blue states are passing a blizzard of laws to help people and make their lives better.
Posted inFilm/TV
‘The Good Lord Bird’: Dark satire with a white-hot moral core
Reading Time: 4 minutes What kind of white man puts his life on the line to fight slavery? James McBride’s irreverent portrait of John Brown offers an answer.
Posted inNews
UN to investigate Iran. History says that means nothing
Reading Time: 3 minutes Protests have spilled into the streets of Iran for more than three months following the untimely death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September. With the growing number of protests, deaths, and arrests, the UN Human Rights Council has finally taken notice. United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk to called for an independent investigation by […]
Posted inReligion
American evangelicals: Still hungry for persecution
Reading Time: 11 minutes American evangelicals have been indoctrinated for decades with tribalistic fantasies of real religious persecution. Their own leaders have also inaccurately described persecution for decades. At this point, the tribe has no idea what persecution really looks like.
Posted inNews
China’s extreme measures: COVID, climate change, colonialism, and human rights criticism
Reading Time: 3 minutes Between the press of US politics, the stress of Russian war, and various global energy and climate-change crises, keeping up with China might not have been on the agenda. But this country of 1.4 billion human beings had a week of news items worth monitoring. Let’s review the top four: COVID lockdown (again) for 21 […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
Do pro-lifers just not love their mothers?
Reading Time: 10 minutes I’ve been asked this one question many times over the years, and it’s always posed with a spiteful sneer: ‘Aren’t you glad your mother was pro-life?’ But my mother was pro-choice.
Posted inCulture
I’m not celebrating the 4th of July
Reading Time: 3 minutes A 5-year-old with a pair of round glasses with a short, brown bob cut sits in a kindergarten classroom in a northern suburb of St. Louis. The day is just beginning, and the teacher asks the class to stand to perform the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. As she places her right hand […]
Posted inNews
The Thomas promise: Roe is only the beginning
Reading Time: 3 minutes During the period between the unprecedented leak of Justice Alito’s majority opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, some political pundits and legal scholars have argued that the court would not stop at abortion—that established rights including gay marriage and even contraception could be […]
Posted inLaw
What does being a ‘person’ do?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In 2008, a Macedonian court found a bear guilty of damaging beehives. Since it had no owner and belonged to a protected species, the state was made to pay the fine instead. Legal history abounds with stories of animal trials, especially in the Middle Ages and early Enlightenment, when both secular and Ecclesiastical variants played […]